David Gilmour: Extraordinary

“And you didn’t outgrow her?”

“You never do. It’s a bit one-sided that way.”

“Do you see her? Talk to her?”

“Oh yes, scads. That’s not a problem. But she’s guarded now. There are certain things I’m just not permitted to ask about. I’m not even sure there’s anything to know.” She carefully lifted her drink and took a sip. “Unless you know something.”

“Me?”

“You talk to her a bit. I know that,” she said.

“I do. But not much.”

“Tell me. I’m hungry for it. I’m hungry for news about her life.”

“It’ll probably surprise you.”

“Tell me, please.”

So I fixed myself another drink, a good stiff belt, and told her what I knew. “It must have been during her second year at McGill. Yes, that was it. She was doing a degree in Russian literature and had this giant apartment on rue Sainte-Famille in the student ghetto. She was the house social director. Lots of parties. So many, in fact, that the police were on a first-name basis with her. But you know Chloe: when she turns it on, when she gives you that sun lamp smile, she’s irresistible.”

“Go on,” her mother said. “I’m loving this.” She was watching the movie of her young daughter living out in the world for the first time.

“I had some business in Montreal that weekend, a misunderstanding with a supplier—I was in the pharmaceutical supply business back then. I gave her a call, saying I was going to be in town, would she be free. I knew better than to accept an invitation to stay with her. I need eight hours of sleep and I sensed that I wouldn’t get that. Besides which, one of the girls she shared a flat with, Miranda Treece, a skinny Texan, was far too sexy to be around for a whole weekend. I’d met her once in front of the Park Plaza in Toronto, and the image of her wandering around the apartment with dirty hair in a ripped T-shirt and raggedy-ass jeans—well, you know what I mean. Forget it.

“I took the train from Toronto—it seemed like a romantic thing to do—and got a room at the Hôtel Nelligan in the old part of the city.

“Chloe, it turned out, was in love that semester with the trombone player of a university swing band. She wanted me to go see him that same night. You heard about this guy?”

“Not the romantic part.”

“At nine o’clock, I was sitting in my hotel room on the rue Saint-Paul, waiting for her to pick me up. Then it was ten o’clock, then eleven o’clock, then midnight, at which point, more pissed off than offended, I took the phone off the hook, got under one of those fluffy white French-Canadian duvets and fell asleep.

“Or I must have. Because I remember I had a little dream. I was walking along a quiet street in Amsterdam when a tree cracked and collapsed into the canal near me. Of course, there was no tree—it was the sound of Chloe banging her bony knuckles on my door. It was two o’clock in the morning. I peeked through the peephole. An unblinking eye circled in black makeup peered at me from the other side. The stuff Keith Richards wears.”

“Kohl.”

“Right. I opened the door and said, ‘Chloe, this is a ridiculous hour to turn up.’

“There were four beautiful young women in the hallway. Made-up faces, jangly party dresses, perfume wafting off them. They looked like movie stars.”

Sally listened, motionless with attention. “God, she’s beautiful, isn’t she? Even if you divide it in half because I’m her mother.”

I went on. “I suspected they were martini girls, which are an expensive breed. I was worried about money that year. You may remember our family stockbroker, Clyde Meadows?”

“No, I never got any of that money. But go on, go on.”

“Anyway, Clyde Meadows, that poor son of a bitch, shot himself in the wine cellar of his Rosedale mansion. But not before losing almost all of my inheritance. Jake’s too.”

Sally said, “Was he the guy whose wife disappeared for a few weeks with the Mexican masseur?”

“Same guy. Anyway, I was pretty broke. Ergo that stupid job with the pharmacy company. And I knew that by heading out with these four swans, I was tacitly agreeing to pay for everything.

“Still, they were irresistible—their excitement, their beauty, the smell of them. Miranda, my God. She wore a noodle-strapped dress with a feather boa around her neck. I can’t remember where the club was, just that the band was in full session when we arrived. They were swinging through a Glenn Miller standard, ‘Moonlight Serenade.’ It was like stepping into a Woody Allen film.

“Chloe pointed out the trombone player. He was a classic nightmare for a young woman: lush lips, thick hair, rosy cheeks, a savvy, effortless way of holding his horn between riffs. You could see he took it all for granted—his outrageous beauty, the girls lining the front of the stage, the eternity of his youth. He was a star, and I knew he was going to make her suffer.”

“And did he?”

“You never heard this?”

“Not a peep. I think by then she thought she’d already told her mother too much. As if, by even mentioning it, she might put a jinx on it.”

I took a sip of my drink. I was quite drunk. “You have to be old to say that there’s a good side to suffering. But there often is.”

“How so?”

“Well, I suppose it was because of the trombonist that Chloe and I got to know each other that winter.

“She phoned me long-distance the following Sunday morning. On the surface, it was a courtesy call. Thanks for coming out, for giving everybody such a swell evening. Two hundred dollars! Jesus. But there was something just a little bit sour hanging over the conversation, and I sensed she was in some kind of discomfort. I hesitated to inquire, though. I generally try to avoid asking young women about their romantic woes—the intimacy is somewhat neutering.

“Still, I felt she was on the edge of something, that all she needed was a small, encouraging push and she could get rid of it, like pulling a splinter out of her finger. And sure enough, after a while it came out. The three of them—she, the trombonist and Miranda Treece, the girl with the feather boa—had shared a taxi home at the end of the evening at the jazz club. They stopped first at the trombonist’s. He got out. Miranda, who was sitting in the front seat, got out, Chloe thought, to change places. She couldn’t see what was happening, but it was taking longer than it should to just say good night, and a few moments later Miranda popped that long neck of hers into the window and said she was going to hang around for a bit. See you back at the flat.

“So there she was, our little Chloe, in the back of the taxi all by herself, going home to nothing on a Saturday night. Just hearing the story broke my heart. It really did. It reminded me of my own disappointments. Everyone has them. You with Terry Blanchard, me with that German girl in university, now Chloe. In a way, the specifics never matter, although at the time they seem to do nothing but matter. They seem so unique in a creative, cruel way. But they’re not, of course. In the end, all romantic complaints come down to the same thing: You want somebody who doesn’t want you. Or doesn’t want you as much as you want them. A million variations, but always the same wound. And while Mr. Trombone may have been myopic, while he may have been headed for a bad end fifteen years down the road, for the moment the truth was the truth, which was that he liked the skinny girl from Texas more.

“That should have been punishment enough in itself. But life can be imaginatively spiteful—it’s almost enough to make you believe in a malevolent deity—so not only did Chloe have to observe in the brown eyes of the young musician his waning interest in her, but she was forced to listen to the nightly shrieks of pleasure from Miranda Treece’s bedroom, which sounded, according to Chloe, ‘like they were murdering a hog in there!’